A quick tutorial on Windows partition types

Curing a case of 'restless-PC syndrome'

Wake timers and some types of hardware can cause Windows to run at unexpected times. Here are two different ways to ensure that your sleeping PC stays asleep.

Plus: All the commands available in the Recovery Environment, and why an old PC might suddenly go silent.

PC wakes and runs when it shouldn’t

Reader Warwick Wright’s PC suffers from insomnia.

• “I have a strange problem with Sleep/Hibernate on my PC.

  “If I enable Sleep/Hibernate, the system wakes up without prompting at times that seem to vary from about 11 minutes to about 50 minutes — in the instances I’ve measured. It happened several times overnight before I realized what was happening.

  “I have tried eliminating any relevant items in Windows’ Scheduled Tasks.

  “This didn’t happen under Windows 7, but showed up with Windows 10. Because the problem sneaked up on me, I’m not actually sure it started with the Win10 upgrade — but I suspect so.

  “It makes no difference whether I select Sleep/Hibernate through the Power Options settings, by command line (i.e., shutdown /h), or with power-off button.

  “I can avoid the problem by closing down fully, but I often have quite a number of tasks in train when I finish for the day. It’s very convenient to simply come back and pick up where I left off.

  “Can you pour any light on this perplexing problem?”

This is almost surely caused by the PC’s wake timers — software components that can wake an idle or sleeping system to perform functions such as checking for updates, defragging a hard drive, and so on.

Wake timers are built into various parts of the operating system, including, as you surmised, Task Scheduler. But they can also be part of other software; especially software that runs in the background.

Moreover, some hardware devices (or their drivers) can cause a sleeping PC to come awake, entirely separately from any wake-timer activity.

But wake-timer issues are more common, so I’ll start there.

XP and Vista offered scant control over wake timers. But with Windows 7, Microsoft added some wake-timer controls to the Power Plan settings. Here’s how to access and change them on Win10 (Win8/7 are very similar).

(Note that different types of PCs — e.g., portables versus desktops — have slightly different wake-timer options. I’ll discuss a typical notebook’s settings; adjust what follows for your specific situation.)

• Click Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Power Options.
• Select the active Power Plan and click Change plan settings.
• Click Change advanced power settings.
• Click Change settings that are currently unavailable.
• Scroll down to the Sleep item and click its plus sign to expand the listing.
• Expand the Allow wake timers subheading.
• Under both the On battery and Plugged in settings, select the wake timers you wish the PC to respond to.

  Disable tells the PC to stay asleep — i.e., to ignore the wake timers. Important wake timers only allows some high-priority items, such as some in Scheduled Tasks, to run. Enable allows all wake timers to wake the PC. (See Figure 1: Shown, a typical notebook’s settings; desktop PCs might have different options.)

  

• When you’ve made your choices, exit the Power Options menu by clicking OK and/or Save Changes, as you go.
• If your PC has more than one Power Plan (e.g., Balanced, High Performance, Power Saver, etc.), repeat these same steps for each Plan.

If your PC still wakes unexpectedly, a hardware device may be responsible. To see what’s going on, open an admin-level command window and enter powercfg -lastwake at the prompt. This will typically show the last device that caused your PC to wake up.

(Alternatively, you can see a list of all devices allowed to wake the PC by entering powercfg -devicequery wake_armed at the prompt.)

Now, open Device Manager, locate the device responsible for the unwanted wake-ups, and right-click it. Open the device’s Power Management tab and deselect (uncheck) the option, Allow this device to wake the computer. Click OK and exit Device Manager.

Figure 2 shows the relevant setting on a network controller; other hardware devices have similar settings.

With wake timers controlled via Power Options, and with devices’ ability disturb your PC’s slumber disabled via Device Manager, your PC should now be able to sleep through the night.

Looking for more Recovery Environment info

After reading “Using Windows’ powerful Recovery Environment” (June 23 Top Story), Dwight Reid wanted to dig deeper.

• “Fred, your article covering Recovery Environment was great, but it left me wanting more.

  “Is there a dedicated publication that could lead a novice to understand Recovery Environment in detail?

  “I’ve found many articles covering the subject, but if you’ve written a book on Recovery, I’d snap it up in a second!”

No, Dwight, sorry — no book.

But I wasn’t holding out on you; the very best Recovery Environment resources I know of were listed/linked in that article.

If you’d like help with the actual commands you can use inside any command environment, see TechNet’s comprehensive A-Z command list, which aggregates all the commands available in all the various Windows command environments.

Keep in mind that different command environments support different subsets of those commands. For example, the Recovery Environment is geared specifically towards recovery/repair operations, so it mostly supports those types of commands.

To find what’s available in a specific command environment — e.g., when you’re already in the Recovery Environment or in a regular command window — enter the word help to see a list of available commands. You can then refer back to the TechNet A-Z list to learn more about what each command does.

More directly, you can explore any command further by typing it, entering a space and hyphen (or slash; they work the same), and then a question mark (or “help” or “h”).

For example, to see whether diskpart (Windows’ disk partitioning tool) is available in whatever command environment you’re in, plus the options offered, type any of the following commands — they all work the same way and produce the same result.

diskpart /?

diskpart -?

diskpart /h

diskpart /help

diskpart -h

diskpart -help

If the command environment you’re in supports the command you’ve typed, you’ll see a brief description of how to use that command plus a list of additional modifiers (“switches”) you can use to fine-tune the command’s operation.

If the command isn’t supported, there’s no harm done; you’ll simply get a Command not recognized warning or similar message.

So with a little trial and (harmless) error, you can quickly see whether any command is available and how to use it!

When an old computer suddenly goes silent

Chuck is keeping a Vista system alive, but it’s starting to have serious trouble.

• “I’ve recently lost the sound on my PC (a Gateway running Vista) for no reason I can pinpoint. It seems like it was there one minute and gone the next. I tried using the Microsoft Fixit Audio Playback tool, but to no avail. Any suggestions for how I can get my sound back? Thanks.”

There are two principal reasons why audio might suddenly stop working. The first and most common can happen on any PC, old or new — a driver issue. Perhaps a recent update installed drivers incompatible with your original hardware. I suggest you visit the OEM site and download/install the latest available drivers for your exact model PC.

The other issue is more common with older hardware — and a Vista-era PC could well qualify as such. It’s a hardware failure of some sort on the motherboard or perhaps on a plug-in audio card. For example, audio capacitors are often a weak spot; they can degrade with heat and time and might fail well before any other system component.

In fact, Wikipedia lists no less than eight different common failure modes for capacitors!

There’s no simple test for audio hardware failures, and component-level fixes such as finding and replacing bad capacitors are well beyond typical do-it-yourself skill levels. I wouldn’t try such a repair on my system!

So, I suggest you try an OEM driver update and hope that does the trick. If it doesn’t, then your best bet might be a trip to a repair shop, installing a new audio card (one that includes Vista drivers), or getting a newer PC.

A reminder for all Vista users: The OS will reach end-of-life and become unsupported in less than a year (April 11, 2017). See Microsoft’s Windows lifecycle fact sheet. It’s time to start planning for an operating system upgrade or an upgrade to a new system.

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A quick tutorial on Windows partition types

A recent reader letter lamented the accidental deletion of a critical PC partition. The event rendered the machine unbootable.

It’s easy to get confused about Windows partition types. Here’s a refresher.

A summary of basic partition types and terms

Partitions are, of course, the basic building block of personal computer storage devices. Adding a new drive to a system might require defining whether it’s one big partition or several smaller partitions. Typically, you then set the partitions as simple volumes and format them. (Only the boot partition/volume is set to “active.”)

These basic steps can be managed with Windows built-in Disk Management app (diskmgmt.msc), but I prefer to use a more-powerful third-party tool such as EaseUS Partition Master (free, paid; site).

Figure 1 shows the drive layout for my test Windows 10 system. It has five partitions spread over three physical drives — it’s what you might see on a heavily use desktop PC. (Note: This system was upgraded from Windows 7 to Win8.1 to Win10.)

Right clicking a drive name and selecting Properties/Volumes, shows the drive type, partition style, and other important information about a physical drive, as shown in Figure 2.

Here’s a simple breakdown of that information.

Disk number: Physical drives are automatically assigned numbers by Windows, as they’re initiated. The boot drive is almost always Disk 0. Note that the drive letter (C:, D:, etc.) is not tied to the drive number; aside from drive C:, you can usually reassign drive letters as needed.

There are, however, some exceptions. Letters A: and B: were originally reserved for floppy drives — and still are — so they’re essentially unused these days. Drives D: and E: are typically assigned automatically to optical drives, but that’s not a requirement. For example, if you have a newer system with no optical drive, and you insert a thumb drive, it’ll likely be assigned as drive D:, by default.

Bottom line: Typically, you’ll only need the disk number when using some advanced command-line tasks.

Type: On most workstations, Windows’ Disk Management app usually labels fixed drives as “Basic” and removable devices such as flash drives as “Removable.” But another two drive types are “Basic” or “Dynamic.” Simply put, Basic disks are contained on a single, physical drive, while Dynamic disks can span multiple drives — a requirement for RAID and server applications (more info).

There’s another wrinkle in Windows’ fixed versus removable status. With removable drives, clicking Properties/Polices in Windows’ Disk Management gives you two “Removal policy” options: Quick removal (the default) and Better performance (see Figure 3).

These options don’t appear on fixed drives, but they also seem disconnected from whether the type is labeled as Basic or Removable. For example, I had an internal drive connected to the PC via a USB drive adapter. That drive was labeled “Basic,” but the properties dialog box included the Removal policy options. On the other hand, it did not include “Eject” in the right-click context menu in File Explorer.

Partition style: Most Windows-workstation drives are set to a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition style. This is the original format for PCs, but it has two significant limitations: First, it typically can’t address drives larger than 2TB. Until fairly recently, that wasn’t a big problem for most PC users. But now drives of three and four terabytes are common and — cheap. Second: MBR disks are limited to four partitions.

The Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table GPT) technology solves the size and partition-number problem, and you might see it on newer Windows 10 machines. Not only does it support truly massive drive sizes, it allows for up to 128 primary partitions. (It doesn’t, however, provide any real performance improvements.)

To boot Windows from a GPT drive, you must have a 64-bit OS and a UEFI-boot system. For more on the differences between MBR and GPT, see the comprehensive MSDN page, “Windows and GPT FAQ.”

Bottom line: In most cases, you don’t need to worry whether your original boot drive is MBR or GPT. But if you purchase a drive larger then 2TB, you’ll want to set it up with GPT.

Reserved space: This typically small partition might also be called System Reserved or just System. The reserved space is automatically created when a drive is first partitioned by Windows. It can’t be created after other partitions. OEM vendors might give this partition another name (such as SYSTEM_DRV) and make it significantly larger so it can also hold system recovery tools.

According to a TechNet article, the reserved partition usually holds the Boot Manager code and the Boot Configuration Database. It can also contain BitLocker startup files and software used for UEFI/GPT-equipped systems.

It’s possible to boot Windows without a system/reserve partition, typically by not letting Windows create in the first place. (Use a third-party partition manager to create one partition on the drive, before installing Windows.) But it’s really not worth the effort. You’re not going to gain that much free disk space.

Most important, you can’t simply delete the system partition if it already exists. As one Windows Secrets reader discovered, it will probably make your system unbootable.

The reserve partition can also cause problems when upgrading dual-boot or multi-boot systems. With multiple versions of Windows installed, the order of OS installation becomes important; newer Windows boot managers, held in the reserved partition, are often not compatible with older operating systems. For more on this, see the Feb. 12, 2015, LangaList item, “How to avoid Win7/Win8 dual-boot hassles.”

Recovery partition: Installing Windows 10 will probably result in the creation of a hidden Recovery partition. It’s used to support the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) — first released with Vista. WinRE can help a system recover from severe boot problems (more info), and OEM vendors might also use the recovery partition for their own rescue tools.

Although many of the WinRE functions are duplicated in the Windows recovery/rescue disc (which you undoubtedly created), it’s generally best to leave this partition in place — unless it’s taking an extraordinarily excessive amount of disk space.

Primary, Extended, and Logical partitions: Primary partitions can contain both system files and user data, and they’re typically used on the boot disk (Disk 0). Non-boot drives might be automatically set up as Extended partitions with one or more Logical drives. Each logical drive is formatted separately and assigned its own drive letter. Again, the MBR format allows no more than four partitions on a disk. To break that limitation, one of the four must be an extended partition with one or more logical drives.

Understanding Windows 10’s Storage Spaces

First introduced with Windows 8, Microsoft’s Storage Spaces is effectively the opposite of partitioning. The technology lets you create virtual disks pooled from multiple drives. If at some later time you need additional storage, more drives can be added to the pool. Think of this as a form of RAID.

Storage Spaces lets you set up Simple spaces with no redundancy, Mirror spaces protects against a single drive failure, and Parity spaces lets you recover from up to two faulty drives. According to the Win10 Storage Spaces overview, you can use various types of hard drives.

Sounds simple, but it has some catches. For example, when you first create a new Spaces pool, the selected drives are formatted. And you’ll need a minimum of two extra drives that can be safely wiped — your boot drive obviously can be included in a Spaces pool. However, new drives can be added later, without reformatting the original pool of drives.

The average Win10 user isn’t going to benefit from Storage Spaces. It’s really intended for keeping large amounts of data safe from local drive failures. But if you keep very large libraries of digital images or music, it might be worth a look (more info).

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